James Beard award–winning local author Adrian Miller will discuss and sign his new book The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas ($30.00 University of North Carolina Press ISBN: 9781469632537), which vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. A treasury of information about cooking techniques and equipment, this book includes twenty recipes for which black chefs were celebrated. Surveying the labor of enslaved people during the antebellum period and the gradual opening of employment after Emancipation, Miller highlights how food-related work slowly became professionalized and the important part African Americans played in that process.